Website Accessibility Regs Coming

The DOJ has posted an announcement of its intention to begin the process of enacting website accessibility regulations under Title II. Comment is open until June 2023. While the regulations would only be applicable to state and local governments, regulation of private businesses subject to Title III may well follow, and be similar. Such guidance has been a goal of disability activists, governments and private businesses for a long time. The last time the DOJ tried was under Obama, but it was a drawn out process, and hadn’t been concluded when the Trump DOJ abruptly ended it in 2017. The Seyfarth firm has a list of questions the regulations should answer, among them: At what point is a website or app considered accessible in compliance with the law and how is that measured? How will third party content and/or crowd-sourced material be treated? Will the regulations permit alternative access or “equivalent facilitation” for complex content such as detailed charts and graphs?